A New Role: Bots and Apps at Quartz

It's been an amazing run.

For nearly 16 years I've been at radio station WNYC, working with dedicated, talented people to inform New Yorkers every day and to help them navigate elections, blackouts, hurricanes and terror attacks.

Most recently I've helped mix code, design and reporting into new forms of journalism with brilliant colleagues on the WNYC Data News Team.

Along the way I've been tinkering with bots, chat systems and artificial intelligence. These explorations, together with my lifelong interest in journalism technology, have led me to a new role at Quartz.

I'll be building bots in the new Quartz Bot Studio and managing future iterations of Quartz's breakthrough iPhone and Android apps.

It's such an honor. I've been a fan of Quartz's executive editor and VP of product Zach Seward for many years, and I'm always impressed by how well Quartz crafts its site, newsletters, tools and apps to be super useful and exceptionally user-friendly. I feel so fortunate to be joining that team.

This all begins two weeks from today, which won't leave nearly enough time to get through my goodbyes and recount all of my memories at WNYC. But I'm excited about what's ahead, and I'll always be a listener and a member.

Fast Company on WNYC's Storytelling Experiments

Fast Company writer John Paul Titlow did a great job capturing the spirit of experimentation at WNYC -- and me doing an ill-advised live demo on stage:

"Anyone who thinks old-school media can't be stealthy and innovative has never seen John Keefe text a room full of people from a command line on his laptop. But tonight, the senior editor for data news at WNYC—a public radio station founded in 1924—is showing off some things he built to help his colleagues tell stories."

Read the whole story here.